Abstract
This paper presents a theory explaining the success of information systems development based on SQL-type database technology by showing that the assumptions underlying that technology correspond very closely to the way Searle’s institutional facts are created. The theory presented is a theory of action and design, so its productivity is shown by retrodiction of the necessity for business process engineering to achieve integration of information systems within an organisation, and prediction that interorganisational integration of information systems using the internet can succeed only if the applications share institutional facts. The theory is used to predict that autonomous intelligent agent applications can succeed in the information spaces populated by these common institutional facts.
Table of Contents
Information systems are generally and very successfully implemented using a particular sort of technology typified by relational database systems, which I will call logical databases for reasons that will be explained below. There are alternative technologies. Why have logical database systems been successful?
Information systems have, for the most part, been successful in relatively restricted organisational subunits. A large organisation therefore may have hundreds of information systems. Over the past two decades organisations have been trying to develop information systems implemented by logical databases at the scale of the whole, typically by integrating the successful local systems. There are successes, but it has turned out that it requires an enormous effort, including changes in the way the organisation sees itself (e.g. through business process re-engineering), in order to achieve success. The question is: why is it so hard to extend successful local information systems to an organisation-scale system?
Organisations interoperate with other organisations in a global economy. A global communication infrastructure now exists which makes it easy for anyone to communicate with anyone else. There is a strong business case to interconnect the logical database-implemented systems of multiple organisations for a wide variety of purposes. But if it is hard to integrate systems within a single organisation, what hope is there for integration across organisations? After all, many of the things done to achieve single-organisation integration depend strongly on central management commitment. There is by definition no central management where the problem is to integrate systems across organisations. What can we hope to achieve?
We have a technology that works extremely well on a small scale, is difficult but possible to adapt to an organisational scale, and which we now want to further adapt to a global scale. The thesis of this paper is that in order to understand what is feasible on the global scale we need to understand why the technology is so successful on a local scale, and why it is difficult to adapt to an organisation-wide or larger scale.